Bard's Tale IV - Patch Plans

September 21st, 2018, 14:12

I fired this one up just for an hour last night, and enjoyed what I saw. I fiddled around the town for a bit, found the adventurer's guild, and stopped right there. It is surely a bit unwieldy to play right now, but a patch or two might make that far less painful.

Originally Posted by Carnifex
I fired this one up just for an hour last night, and enjoyed what I saw. I fiddled around the town for a bit, found the adventurer's guild, and stopped right there. It is surely a bit unwieldy to play right now, but a patch or two might make that far less painful.

It definitely opens up a lot after that point too. The undercity is a pretty interesting and well done area with lots of secrets, places to explore, and things you have to come back to when your more powerful. It's not as clear yet if any of the other zones are quite as interesting though, they generally seem much more linear. But I'm still fairly early in.

Originally Posted by wolfing
Better not. Enjoy the games just as you've been doing. Once you install a FPS meter then you'll start giving it too much importance. Like the case in this game, it's not a shooter or an action game, who cares if it's 25 or 55 FPS?

Haha, nope, that won't happen. I'm just curious to see what I get since I find it perfectly playable and notice no glitching at all on a rig without a high end GPU. Most settings on Ultra. So how would I go about measuring it? I realize I can Google it, but there's often so much crap being installed in the background with third party programs these days I prefer recommendations.

Yeah just wandering around town I found a few doors and chests that I didn't have the capabilities of dealing with as of yet. I like finding things like that, as you know at some point you'll be back to explore more!!

Originally Posted by TomRon
Haha, nope, that won't happen. I'm just curious to see what I get since I find it perfectly playable and notice no glitching at all on a rig without a high end GPU. Most settings on Ultra. So how would I go about measuring it? I realize I can Google it, but there's often so much crap being installed in the background with third party programs these days I prefer recommendations.

If you go into the Nvidia Experience app, in the settings you can enable an overlay that will display your FPS.

-- "Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother." Alan Moore

Originally Posted by wolfing
it's not a shooter or an action game, who cares if it's 25 or 55 FPS?

What you say is true. However. It's PC. We were closing eyes on bad ports and slideshows in the past and let unoptimized garbage unpunished, still buying, hoping in time developers will learn better.
They learned wrong, instead of getting better, because of our silence and accepting trash code, they think in year 2018 30 FPS is still standard on PC. Unless we won't be whining, complaining and protesting in every single case where we don't get 60, we'll hear again Ubisoft cinematic experience bullshit lazyarse excuses.

Originally Posted by TheRealFluent
I hope they patch the item description text to be bigger or scaleable. It's very small and hard to read.

I've already mentioned microscopic subtitles being one of disappointments, but you're right. Tooltips font size is even worse!

Originally Posted by crpgnut
Woah, from the sounds of things this might be in the $5 pile by Xmas.

my concern was these new age balanced RPGS are so dumbed down and easy to play its boring, looks like my fears were true i said year ago the alpha gameplayed looked too easy and scripted. Whatever happened to random mobs that are 30 levels above your party when you accidently find some dark evil gate to hell by accident or go in an cave dungeon you know nothing about near a newbie city

Originally Posted by Dragonx
my concern was these new age balanced RPGS are so dumbed down and easy to play its boring, looks like my fears were true i said year ago the alpha gameplayed looked too easy and scripted. Whatever happened to random mobs that are 30 levels above your party when you accidently find some dark evil gate to hell by accident or go in an cave dungeon you know nothing about near a newbie city

Well, you will be slaughtered if you engage mobs that are way over your level. They're not that hard to avoid though, but at least the danger is actually there and there's no lame scaling making every fight doable.

I also wish right click could exit the inventory/character menus. Minor gripe but it cancels other actions, although I guess to Inspect items you need right click for that. Maybe if the mouse is positioned outside of the inventory menu right click could exit. I'd like that a lot.

I wonder sometimes if the technical weaknesses in many games stem from the reliance on using existing engines. In the old days, they had to build their own engines, and would have had John Carmack-type characters around. I wonder if these days the smaller studios just don't have that level of expertise - the people who understand the whole thing under the hood.

-- "Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother." Alan Moore

I doubt it - i mean it might in some case but we've seen unreal games with better controls. Anyway it is passable but it could be improved in a few little ways.

Originally Posted by Ripper
I wonder sometimes if the technical weaknesses in many games stem from the reliance on using existing engines. In the old days, they had to build their own engines, and would have had John Carmack-type characters around. I wonder if these days the smaller studios just don't have that level of expertise - the people who understand the whole thing under the hood.

Patch hit GOG and it did improve the performance allot.
Still struggle to keep above 60 apart from the now locked 144 in menus but no drops bellow 40 anymore which makes the game rather playable.
Will probably jump into Kingmaker first but we'll see how their release go.

Originally Posted by TheRealFluent
Some bug I didn't have at first now I have after the patch. Mainly, it's harder to click on characters in combat. It's hard and takes some fiddling to click characters to give them orders.

That's been a problem for me since the patch as well. More concerning is that I've had a few crashes in combat starting with the patch. They aren't common, but I'm at a point in the game where combats are much slower and there are often many in a row before a save point, so crashing on one is a big deal.